A Refactoring Constraint Language and Its Application to Eiffel

Steimann, Friedrich; Kollee, Christian; Pilgrim, Jens von

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-22655-7_13

Cited by 19 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Specialized refactoring frameworks or DSLs, such as Refacola [27], JunGL [30], and Wrangler [20], also exist. As opposed to Rascal, these systems focus explicitly on refactoring, with features aimed directly at this domain.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scripting a refactoring with Rascal and Eclipse

Hills

Klint

Vinju

2012

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Refactoring Tools

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To facilitate experimentation with creating new, complex refactorings, we want to reuse existing transformation and analysis code as orchestrated parts of a larger refactoring: i.e., to script refactorings. The language we use to perform this scripting must be able to deal with the diversity of languages, tools, analyses, and transformations that arise in practice. To illustrate one solution to this problem, in this paper we describe, in detail, a specific refactoring script for switching from the Visitor design pattern to the Interpreter design pattern. This script, written in the meta-programming language Rascal, and targeting an interpreter written in Java, extracts facts from the interpreter code using the Eclipse JDT, performs the needed analysis in Rascal, and then transforms the interpreter code using a combination of Rascal code and existing JDT refactorings. Using this script we illustrate how a new, real and complex refactoring can be scripted in a few hundred lines of code and within a short timeframe. We believe the key to successfully building such refactorings is the ability to pair existing tools, focused on specific languages, with general-purpose meta-programming languages.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scripting a refactoring with Rascal and Eclipse

Hills

Klint

Vinju

2012

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Refactoring Tools

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“…For the implementation of the reflection constraints we made use of the RefaCola [35], a domain specific language for the formal specification of constraint rules. The RefaCola comes with a compiler that automatically translates refactoring specifications into a ready-to-use constraint generator and solver, which can easily be used within refactoring-tool implementations for various IDEs such as Eclipse.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The RefaCola comes with a compiler that automatically translates refactoring specifications into a ready-to-use constraint generator and solver, which can easily be used within refactoring-tool implementations for various IDEs such as Eclipse. Besides that, RefaCola offers solutions for most of the technical problems of constraint-based refactoring, e.g., by providing techniques to only generate those constraints actually necessary for the intended refactoring [35].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The tools address naming as well as typing and accessibility issues in Java. Our implementation builds on the RefaCola [35], a domainspecific language that allows researchers to formally define constraint generation rules. From those rules, a compiler automatically generates a ready-to-use constraint generator and solver to be used in refactoring tools such as ours.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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RefaFlex: safer refactorings for reflective Java programs

Thies

Bodden

2012

Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

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If programs access types and members through reflection, refactoring tools cannot guarantee that refactorings on those programs are behavior preserving. Refactoring approaches for highly reflective languages like Smalltalk therefore check behavior preservation using regression testing.In this paper we propose RefaFlex, a novel and more defensive approach towards the refactoring of reflective (Java) programs. RefaFlex uses a dynamic program analysis to log reflective calls during test runs and then uses this information to proactively prevent the programmer from executing refactorings that could otherwise alter the program's behavior. This makes re-running test cases obsolete: when a refactoring is permitted, tests passing originally are guaranteed to pass for the refactored program as well. In some cases, we further re-write reflective calls, permitting refactorings that would otherwise have to be rejected.We have implemented RefaFlex as an open source Eclipse plugin and offer extensions for six Eclipse refactoring tools addressing naming, typing, and accessibility issues. Our evaluation with 21,524 refactoring runs on three open source programs shows that our tool successfully prevents 1,358 non-behaviour-preserving refactorings which the plain Eclipse refactorings would have incorrectly permitted.

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“…Constraint-based refactoring is a refactoring technique that relies on constraints for the specification of invariants that a refactoring must regard [18,19,24,25]. In constraintbased refactoring, a refactoring problem is translated to a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) whose solutions represent legal refactorings of the artefact to be refactored.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

From well-formedness to meaning preservation: model refactoring for almost free

Steimann

2013

Softw Syst Model

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Modelling languages such as the UML specify well-formedness as constraints on models. For the refactoring of a model to be correct, it must take these constraints into account and check that they are still satisfied after the refactoring has been performed-if not, execution of the refactoring must be refused. By replacing constraint checking with constraint solving, we show how the role of constraints can be lifted from permitting or denying a tentative refactoring to computing additional model changes required for the refactoring to be executable. Thus, to the degree that the semantics of a modelling language is specified using constraints, refactorings based on these constraints are guaranteed to be meaning preserving. To be able to exploit constraints available in the form of a language's well-formedness rules for refactoring, we present a mapping from these rules to the constraint rules required by constraint-based refactoring. Where there are no gaps between well-formedness and (static) semantics of a modelling language, these mappings enable structural refactorings of models at no extra cost; where there are, we identify ways of detecting and filling the gaps.

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A Refactoring Constraint Language and Its Application to Eiffel

Cited by 19 publications

References 17 publications

Scripting a refactoring with Rascal and Eclipse

Scripting a refactoring with Rascal and Eclipse

RefaFlex: safer refactorings for reflective Java programs

From well-formedness to meaning preservation: model refactoring for almost free

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